A new documentary insinuates persistent badgering by a pair of overzealous Boston prosecutors played a significant role in the suicide of an Internet folk hero. His name was Aaron Swartz and his crime was nothing more than downloading law documents from an MIT computer, papers he had legal access to as a Harvard fellow. He never sold or distributed the files, yet U.S Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann accused him of theft and other bogus malfeasances that would have bought him an 8x8 suite in Leavenworth for up to 50 years.

Were the two acting alone, using Swartz, the equivalent of a World Wide Web Robin Hood, to advance their political careers? Or were they merely doing the bidding of an Obama administration that wanted to make an example of an Internet activist wielding too much power for its liking? Those are just some of the intriguing questions director Brian Knappenberger raises in his heartbreaking documentary “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.” Although bordering on hagiography, the film remains a stirring account of a boy genius who had a major hand in creating both the popular Website Reddit, and the revolutionary Web-feed software RSS. Swartz made a small fortune off both, but riches were never his goal. We’re told he simply wanted to make the world a better place, using his Internet savvy to forge a political career that would have focused on obliterating government secrecy and protecting the right to privacy.

By the time of his suicide in January 2013, the 26-year-old Swartz had already played a key role in Elizabeth Warren's election to the Senate and organized a powerful online campaign (Remember the one-day Internet blackout in November 2011?) that stuck a knife in the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts, both of which would have slapped corporate-backed restrictions on the Net. One can only wonder how much higher his profile might have risen had the Justice Department not designated him public enemy No. 1 instead of going after the real scoundrels, the folks responsible for the 2008 financial crash. Swartz might not have made it to the White House, as the film not-so-subtly suggests, but he certainly had the chutzpah and intellect to lead the charge for such social issues as income equality and equal access to the public domain.

It was the latter that got Swartz into legal trouble. He thought it grossly unfair that high fees were being charged to access books, documents and studies (many of them funded by federal grants) that were part of the public record. He reasoned that the fees were nothing more than a poll tax unjustly aimed at the poor. Knowing this was his philosophy, Ortiz and Heymann concluded it was Swartz’s intent to share the thousands of JSTOR documents he downloaded by patching a laptop into the MIT computer network. But the prosecutors had no concrete proof Swartz intended to sell or distribute the documents. They just assumed. And you know what they say about the word “assume” making an ass out of you and me. Never more true than here, especially when you consider that both JSTOR and MIT refused to press charges.

Page 2 of 2 - Heymann even threatened Swartz’s girlfriend, journalist Quinn Norton, with seizure of her personal computer if she didn’t submit to questioning. As it turned out, her deposition only dragged Swartz in deeper via a momentary slip of the tongue, a mistake that continues to haunt Norton to this day. She’s just one of the many interviewees Knappenberger includes in a fast-paced, well-edited movie that instills both remorse over what’s been lost and anger toward the federal government and its selective enforcement of the law.

There’s nothing special about the film’s structure, which is the usual mix of talking heads (chief among them Swartz's mentor, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig), stills and archival footage, including home movies shot when Swartz was a highly precocious child. But the emotional connections Knappenberger makes are extraordinary. And the depth of your involvement in Swartz’s story is even greater.

More than anything, “The Internet’s Own Boy” is shiver-up-your-spine frightening, as it takes issue with a government that allows so few to hold so much power. Even scarier is the notion that any one of us could be the next Aaron Swartz, railroaded through a legal system in which cases solved mean more than justice served. Swartz was no doubt guilty of some level of hanky-panky, but the infractions warranted more of a slap on the wrist than hard time. Why Ortiz and Heymann couldn't recognize this is infuriating, especially knowing their stubbornness indirectly contributed to the death of a promising young man. But they’re going to have to live with that knowledge for the rest of their lives. I pity them.